ILM POLLS THE 20TH CENTURY'S BEST TRACKS ››› YOUR RESULTS THREAD ‹‹‹

that sort of confrontational, disruptive stance or effect has to be in there somewhere.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Just no. That's like saying Serialism in 2010 is avant-garde.

― absinthe of malithe (Noodle Vague), Friday, December 3, 2010 3:40 AM (1 minute ago)

Laurie Anderson was considered an avant-garde composer/musician in the 1980s when this song came out ... having crazy pills moment

Could a list be made out of this showing most popular bands/artists? Shouldn't be too much more work ?? Therefore artists that got lots of noms, therefore lots of vote splitting would show up.

Be good to see this list with only one vote per person counting for each band, or else the results will be distorted by the people that voted for every track by that one band to make sure they placed.

^ no sorry those two chuck berry songs are better than anything else I could have voted for

Not sure the concept of the avant-garde was particularly relevant by 1980, certainly not in musical terms.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha oh superman

I see where you're coming from, but...

Not sure the concept of the avant-garde was particularly relevant by 1980, certainly not in musical terms.

― Matt DC, Friday, December 3, 2010 3:47 AM (1 minute ago)

yes, it was.

i can't think of anyone who's producing what i'd call avant-garde pop at this point. music yes, but not pop. i mean, i'm sure something like it exists somewhere, but i'm just not tuned into those wavelengths. in any genre, the most extreme and progressive fringes might casually be called avant-garde, so long as their formal structures haven't ossified into genre, but it's hard to square that kind of antagonism with "pop". there's a basic conceptual contradiction, in that what is generally popular by definition cannot for long be truly avant-garde, and vice-versa. anyway, the phrase typically describes music that resembles or borrows from familiar popular forms but utilizes them in challenging, artistically intriguing and novel ways. for instance, as integrated with performance art practice, like "o superman".

i get the ha ha ha thing, crut, but you know, sliding scales...

Avant garde is such a pointless term because it requires an exaggerated form of radicalism and lack of compromise. A lot of arty pop was still being made in the early 80s though, and is still being made today.

yeah, but that's where we started, with people wanting to distinguish between pop that might seem trivially arty to some and the "real avant-garde" or whatever

There is no such thing as "trivially" arty though. The best art in music is always a result of compromise, from Bach and Mozart to this day.

xxxxxp

Laurie Anderson was considered an avant-garde composer/musician in the 1980s when this song came out ...

This is kind of in the same way that Damien Hirst does "modern art" - it's after a serious rupture that distinguishes things as "classic" and "modern/avant-garde" in popular consciousness, but it doesn't belong to that rupture. The fusion of high and low culture in ~1980 New York was important and new, and O Superman led to wider awareness of what could be done with electronic music, but it didn't change how people thought in a significant way. IMO.

This is kind of in the same way that Damien Hirst does "modern art" - it's after a serious rupture that distinguishes things as "classic" and "modern/avant-garde" in popular consciousness, but it doesn't belong to that rupture. The fusion of high and low culture in ~1980 New York was important and new, and O Superman led to wider awareness of what could be done with electronic music, but it didn't change how people thought in a significant way. IMO.

Exactly.

There is no such thing as "trivially" arty though. The best art in music is always a result of compromise, from Bach and Mozart to this day.

― You're Twistin' My Melody Man! (Geir Hongro), Friday, December 3, 2010 3:58 AM (38 seconds ago) Bookmark

sure, but everybody dismisses the art they don't like (not to point fingers or anything...)

Doesn't change the fact that O Superman is awesome and I hope it turns up soon.

uh, who's talking about changing the way people thought about anything? That is what she and a number of her contemporaries were called back in the 70s/80s -- they were referred to as avant-garde composers/musicians.

Yes but this whole argument is about the point at which bandying a term like "avant-garde" becomes devalued and redundant and useless. Lots of stuff gets called "experimental" without actually being so.

XX Post "Oh Superman" is indeed quite annoying. Kind of interesting for the first two minutes, then repetitive and boring and pointless.

Probably obvious that you can identify two senses of "avant-garde":

"avant-garde" in the narrow sense is something utterly new, which has never been done before and opens a world of new possibilities. In musical terms I'd think of Stockhausen, La Monte Young, "Ascension".

"avant-garde" in the broader sense, and the sense in which it's usually used in ILX-world discourse, is a less ambitious version that applies to things that are new and interesting, and have pretensions beyond what has gone before in the genre in question. So yeah, Oh Superman is avant-garde in a pop context, Kraftwerk is avant-garde, Soft Machine is avant-garde, Timbaland was avant-garde.

Again IMO - I'm wary of pontificating on stuff I don't have an overall perspective on.

yeah "O Superman" is a fully realized performance work that doesn't really sound/function like anything that came before it, even though plenty of weirder shit came before it. Not to be like OMG LAURIE ANDERSON SO INNOVATIVE but I feel like the "novelty pop hit" status kind of obscures the context in which she was working.

All kinds of genre mixing is experimental. Without exception.

Avant garde is such a pointless term because it requires an exaggerated form of radicalism and lack of compromise.

Actually, if you were Cornelius Cardew, the avant-garde holds no form of radicalism at all and is fact counter-revolutionary. Stockhausen serves imperialism and all that. So ner.

"avant-garde" in the broader sense, and the sense in which it's usually used in ILX-world discourse, is a less ambitious version that applies to things that are new and interesting, and have pretensions beyond what has gone before in the genre in question. So yeah, Oh Superman is avant-garde in a pop context,

def

Kraftwerk is avant-garde,

probably

Soft Machine is avant-garde,

ehhhhhhh

Timbaland was avant-garde.

no.

For instance, Michael Jackson was experimenting when he brought a heavy metal guitar into "Beat It". Because that was very unusual in his musical style.

The fusion of high and low culture in ~1980 New York was important and new, and O Superman led to wider awareness of what could be done with electronic music, but it didn't change how people thought in a significant way. IMO.

― seandalai, Friday, December 3, 2010 4:00 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm not sure that this is so. prior to the fusion you're talking about, i don't think that late 20th century fine or high art had really interacted directly with the pop charts in this way. in that, "o superman" was, for a moment, rather avant-garde. it belonged to a fairly rarefied arts culture, but also to mainstream america, to pop. and anderson's performance was inventive and challenging in ways that went beyond the promotion of electronic music. these things may not have been so obviously present in "o superman" the pop tune, but it's unfair to separate the hit from its proper context in her work.

xxxxxxp again:

Ok, there's a third sense, which is what sarahel is touching on - "avant-garde" as genre. Post-Webern music in the classical lineage tends to get called "avant-garde" by default. In this sense, Laurie Anderson is an avant-garde composer.

xp - there's a difference between arbitrarily calling something or someone "avant-garde" or "experimental" - and referring to something or someone by those terms who has historically been canonized in that way! It's like arguing that "Freebird" isn't a rock song because you don't think it "rocks."

basically, as sean mentioned in the post before mine -- "avant garde as genre"

freebird sucks

seandali & sarah otm about certain strains of 20th century composition - at that point it becomes a fairly simple genre descriptor

but i kinda hate that use of the phrase

Gotta go now, see you later for THE FINAL RECKONING.

"avant garde as genre"

Yeah I see where you're coming from with this but "avant-garde as genre" is a very self-defeating concept. Once the barriers have been broken open it takes a long time to get to new barriers. Laurie Anderson is/was experimental but only after a large and comfortable space had broken open for that experimentation to take place.

I see where you and others who don't like the term are coming from, and LJ does have a habit of using questionable adjectives when describing music (he and I have an ongoing battle over appropriate use of the word "brutal" to describe various bands) -- but in this case, his usage of "avant-garde" to describe "O Superman" is perfectly acceptable.

yeah but stop using it

could have used "angular" instead

classic ILM argument about who likes a record the right way :D love you guyz

go back in time and tell that to 60s/70s/80s NYC

Geir you shd try listening to it all the way thru

go back in time and tell that to 60s/70s/80s NYC

Can think of one or two more important things to be telling them though.

I see where you and others who don't like the term are coming from, and LJ does have a habit of using questionable adjectives when describing music (he and I have an ongoing battle over appropriate use of the word "brutal" to describe various bands) -- but in this case, his usage of "avant-garde" to describe "O Superman" is perfectly acceptable.

^^^Agree with all of this (particularly the questionable adjectives bit, ha).

http://www.the-artfile.com/gallery/artists/duchamp/toilet.jpg

lovers VS. critics (forever)

this is a fun poll. I think all-time artists would have been even more so.

yeah I think artists might have been an easier/funner one to do, can we do that?

I would imagine the results of an artists poll would be even more trad-ILM than this tracks one.

Clean sweep for Nate Dogg IMO.

That's not the Elis Regina tune I voted for, but it's a good song, and I'm glad it broke the arty white dude domination.

― Tuomas, Quarta-feira, 1 de Dezembro de 2010 11:00 (2 days ago) Bookmark

That's puzzling. Elis and Tom Jobim are not considered white and arty outside Brazil?

Elis was not a dude, as far as I know.